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Interesting! I would've thought that Texas and the Midwest would have been quite distinct.

Me too. Maybe I have no idea what I sound like.

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” ~ John Rogers

Actually, now that I think about it, it is reasonable that I would have more of a Midland-like accent precisely because of where I live. Many of the people in Kansas and Oklahoma moved to California (especially Central California) during the Dust Bowl. Because of that, their way of speaking ended up melding with the lesser populated Central California speech(and where most of the farming and smaller cities are at,) at least phonetically. Grammatically, however, that is a different story. The whole thing about "anymore" is foreign to me. But I could probably live in Kansas, Oklahoma, or Missouri and sound almost like a native until my grammatical ways of speaking gives it away.

Super interesting! I bet they chose it based on your pronunciations of words more than specific vocabulary. New England accents are the closest American accents to British English since that area was pretty much exclusively British colonists for a long time. That's why they drop their /r/ sound a lot (pahk the cah is the American descendent of the British "pawk the caw"). NZ's accent is obviously heavily influenced by the British too. I wouldn't be surprised if the more nuanced pronunciation differences (like vowel sound differences and emphasized syllables) followed the same patterns to some extent.

The English 'r' is even more prominent than the NZ version (although it's equally silly to generalise about British or English accents because they're so varied). *The English pronounce it, just more softly than most Americans (ie. it sounds like a 'w' to you but this at least resembles the letter 'r' in sound). *Here, we don't say it at all except if it's combined with a consonant (even then we try to avoid it). *Actually, you'd think we were trying to destroy consonants altogether.

Who knew we had such a distinct accent in Michigan!? I knew we spoke Midwest-y, but how specifically they're callin out southeast Michigan is pretty funny to me. Are we really that distinct?

I imagined it would be Midwest-y with a Canadian-esque twist. But then what would I know?

Originally Posted by 93JC

They don't even exist here, so feel free to call 'em whatever you want.

What's weirder for me is the gamut of terms for things that we don't have at all, like the 'slater' or 'rolly poley'. We don't have little grey crustaceans skittering around. The only crustaceans here are cooked and served for dinner!

They look like creepy little insects, about a centimetre long and live in your wood pile. I occasionally see them in the garden too. Maybe you do have them, but if you didn't have a fireplace or don't work with wood, you wouldn't see them much.

EDIT: After some research, it seems that Wikipedia calls it a "woodlouse", and it practically has a different name in every country (and even within some countries, it seems)

Some friends of mine came back from several months travelling in the US and they joked about how much Americans say these things after you sneeze. They thought it was hilarious that if you sneeze in a public place, 5 people will desperately leap out at you and say "bless you!", like their lives depended on it.

INFP 4w5 so/sp

I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas;
they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.
- Emily Bronte

They look like creepy little insects, about a centimetre long and live in your wood pile. I occasionally see them in the garden too. Maybe you do have them, but if you didn't have a fireplace or don't work with wood, you wouldn't see them much.

EDIT: After some research, it seems that Wikipedia calls it a "woodlouse", and it practically has a different name in every country (and even within some countries, it seems)

Thanks for the link. We do have "woodlice" after all, but not the kind that roll up into a ball to protect themselves.

Some friends of mine came back from several months travelling in the US and they joked about how much Americans say these things after you sneeze. They thought it was hilarious that if you sneeze in a public place, 5 people will desperately leap out at you and say "bless you!", like their lives depended on it.

lol! i love this story!!! you said you were from new zealand? now, that must be a wicked cool place to live.

Funny. I've never been to Massachusetts, but I guess I should go and meet some people who speak like me. (The place I am from did show up on the map as very red, though, so this test was accurate for me outside of naming the top 5 cities.)

Can't access the server ATM, so I took the quiz at the link posted by 93JC for the time being...

I don't agree with the results from the quiz I took at the link above.

It claims my accent/dialect is:

"Mid-Atlantic"

My wife's aunt and uncle are from Atlantic City, and I lived in Pennsylvania for one year when I was 9 years old - so I know what the "Mid-Atlantic" accent sounds like, and that is not how my voice sounds.
Looking forward to taking the other quiz to compare the results.